IoT Giving Retail a Bright Future

It is often said that to be successful in business, you need to know your customer. Real estate agents and car salesmen, for example, go out of their way to connect with clients, taking an interest in their lives and highlighting the selling points that will appeal to them most in order to clinch the sale. While retailers don’t have the time to form such personal bonds, modern technology and The Internet of Things (IoT) are giving them a deeper insight into their buying audience.

No one can deny the importance of knowing more about customers, but it’s also important to be able to provide them what they seek. As the retail landscape enters firmly into the omnichannel territory, product availability has never been more important. RFID brings new levels of visibility to retail inventory, which his crucial in a time when just 65 percent of the inventory that is reported via inventory management software is accurate.

Smart Stores

By knowing what goes on in stores in real time, retailers can maximize their sales and greatly enhance the customer experience. Those that want to excel need to not only meet their customer demands but accurately anticipate them. Some retailers are turning to Zebra’s Enterprise Asset Intelligence system, SmartSense for Retail, to improve their omnichannel fulfillment and slash missed sales opportunities. By transforming a store into a “smart store” that can automatically detect and track the location of everything inside of it – from merchandise and shoppers to sales associates – a competitive edge can be gained.

SmartSense can give retailers a remarkable 97 percent continuous inventory accuracy, streamlining operations and cutting stocking and labor costs. It also helps retailers to fulfill their online orders with greater speed and accuracy and boost in-store pickup efficiency. It can also make lost sales and out-of-stocks a thing of the past.

All of this is accomplished by using RFID and micro-location sensors in conjunction with video feeds to provide detailed information in one platform, where sophisticated analytics then turns it into actionable insights that can transform operations.

This blog post was based off of an article from ITProPortal. View the original here.